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German Brewers Warn Fracking Could Hurt Beer
Taco Cowboy writes "Those of you who like free beer, watch out! The practice of fracking for shale gas may ruin the beer you drink. Under the 'Reinheitsgebot,' or German purity law, brewers have to produce beer using only malt, hops, yeast and water. 'The water has to be pure and more than half [of] Germany's brewers have their own wells which are situated outside areas that could be protected under the government's current planned legislation on fracking,' said a Brauer-Bund spokesman. The Brauer-Bund beer association is worried that fracking for shale gas, which involves pumping water and chemicals at high pressure into the ground, could pollute water used for brewing and break a 500-year-old industry rule on water purity."
The Reinheitsgebot stipulates beer have only THREE ingredients: water, barley and hops. The purity law dates to 1516. Yeast wouldn't be discovered until 1680 and even then wasn't recognized as a living organism.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Haven't you ever seen The Lorax or Space Balls?
/end sarcasm.
The obvious solution will be to bottled and sell fresh air and water and let those that can't afford it die. Who cares what happens to plant and wild life that can't buy bottled products when we could be creating a whole new industry for some big corporation to make huge profits off something required to sustain life.
It was mostly what the British called "short beer". It was pretty watery and had just enough alcohol to kill much of the bacteria.
Nearly. ISTR it was called "small beer" not "short beer". Even modern beer doesn't contain enough alcohol to kill bacteria; the important thing is that to make beer you had to boil it, which kills off any waterborne bacteria that were in your water supply. So up until the advent of treated water supplies you might well get cholera or dysentry from your water supply, but not from your beer.
Ground water contamination is a possibility and we need to remain vigilant in monitoring and controls to make sure that it doesn't happen. Industry obviously needs oversight. However, when done correctly, fracking is done well below the ground water level and will have a layer of "impermeable" (yes, for thousands of years at least) clay, etc. in between the fracking and the groundwater. Contamination today usually happens (infrequently) when the surface installations leak or are improperly sealed. This does happen and we need to work to prevent it with safety controls and monitoring. However, done right, fracking poses less risk to ground water than many other technologies already in use.
1 site contaminated? really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_hydraulic_fracturing#Groundwater_contamination
Skimming 3 paragraphs shows 3 sites in the US and I'm sure proper research would turn up a lot more. There is a movie about this (arguably propaganda) called Gasland that I have yet to watch. Considering potable water is a necessary resource, and natural gas is not necessary (although it is important). I am very very wary of the proposition of risking one for another.
I drink from an aquifer. Most of my neighbors drink either from an aquifer or from ground water. People who are on town water in my town do in fact drink from a lake; the lake water is chlorinated, because it has to be, because animals poop nearby. But if you dumped a thousand gallons of hexane in it, the town would be drinking bottled water for the foreseeable future—there's no way to filter that out at the treatment plant. So don't give me this crap about it not mattering whether the water in streams and lakes is contaminated.
Umm.... no? Good cementing practices will seal off the freshwater aquifers. In some plays this is more difficult than in others, but it's nonsense to say that it can't be done right, only that many states are trying to regulate the wrong things to ensure that it is.
Or if only there was a way to filter the water (they don't already filter it?
In much of Germany, the water in the brewers' wells is so pure, they do not need to filter it.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
it was called "small beer" not "short beer"
Small, short, I just speak American.
Even modern beer doesn't contain enough alcohol to kill bacteria; the important thing is that to make beer you had to boil it
Interesting. I wondered why the small alcohol content worked (maybe it helped a little?). I also wondered why they didn't just boil water, whether it was ignorance or just a preference for beer instead of water (actually I still don't know). I'm also obviously no brewer, as I didn't know you had to boil water to make beer.
I am a brewer, so what you'd learn is that while the small amount of alcohol helps to stem biological activity, there are two parts to ensure bacteria doesn't contaminate the end product - first, that the product is boiled is the true sanitation, but secondly during primary fermentation the active yeast strains compete with bacteria and win (or else it wouldn't be tasty). The fact that beer uses hops is another aid to the effort. The acids in the hop plant have effects that prevent spoilage, such as antibiotic and bacteriostatic qualities against gram-positive bacteria strains, and it seems to fend of molds as well. This way before refrigeration you could cask the beer in the fall/winter/early spring and then put it into a basement or as the germans did, bunkers by river beds, to drink it throughout the summer. Of course, there are exceptions such as belgian sours that purposely utilize brettanomyces, pediococcus, or lactobacillus to introduce the characteristic tang, but that's a little off topic and an entirely different conversation. -ZX